 rid of Miss Brooke, a girl who would
have been requiring you to see the stars by daylight. Between ourselves, little
Celia is worth two of her, and likely after all to be the better match. For this
marriage to Casaubon is as good as going to a nunnery.«
    »Oh, on my own account - it is for Miss Brooke's sake I think her friends
should try to use their influence.«
    »Well, Humphrey doesn't know yet. But when I tell him, you may depend on it
he will say, Why not? Casaubon is a good fellow - and young - young enough.
These charitable people never know vinegar from wine till they have swallowed it
and got the colic. However, if I were a man I should prefer Celia, especially
when Dorothea was gone. The truth is, you have been courting one and have won
the other. I can see that she admires you almost as much as a man expects to be
admired. If it were any one but me who said so, you might think it exaggeration.
Good-bye!«
    Sir James handed Mrs. Cadwallader to the phaeton, and then jumped on his
horse. He was not going to renounce his ride because of his friend's unpleasant
news - only to ride the faster in some other direction than that of Tipton
Grange.
    Now, why on earth should Mrs. Cadwallader have been at all busy about Miss
Brooke's marriage; and why, when one match that she liked to think she had a
hand in was frustrated, should she have straightway contrived the preliminaries
of another? Was there any ingenious plot, any hide-and-seek course of action,
which might be detected by a careful telescopic watch? Not at all: a telescope
might have swept the parishes of Tipton and Freshitt, the whole area visited by
Mrs. Cadwallader in her phaeton, without witnessing any interview that could
excite suspicion, or any scene from which she did not return with the same
unperturbed keenness of eye and the same high natural colour. In fact, if that
convenient vehicle had existed in the days of the Seven Sages, one of them would
doubtless have remarked, that you can know little of women by following them
about in their pony phaetons. Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we
find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for
whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active
voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so
many animated tax-pennies, a
